A quiet talk
by ayleid
Summary: Like all fans, I have theories and ideas perpetually bouncing around my head. This is my first piece of headcanon that I found myself so obsessed with I actually finished putting it in words. Tell me what you think.


Ruby pushed open the door and let herself in, then closed it on the snowfall billowing in the night. It was warm inside, and she was happy to shed a couple of scarves and shake off some snow. Atlesian weather was rough, and snowstorms common. It did have its advantages, though, she mused while looking about her. Few Grimm could withstand that kind of weather, and those that could were on the big side, with no chance of staying unnoticed for long. The house she was in was more isolated than any she had ever seen, even more so than her own home in Patch. It would have been unthinkable on a normal continental landmass.

The entrance hall she found herself in was cozy yet modern. Sharp angles and white surfaces abounded, but the lights that had automatically turned on were soft and warm. Ruby found herself walking softly. The man on the phone had told her the door would be open, but it still felt like she was intruding.

"Hello?" she called.

There was only silence. To shake off the awkwardness, she gazed at the furniture, pictures and trinkets around her. She suddenly saw it then: a single picture hung on the wall, of the owner of the house, Doctor Silvestre Polendina, and beside him… Penny.

She got closer, unable to tear her eyes off the picture. The background was of a laboratory, strange machines and workstations all around. Both Penny and her father had a slightly awkward air about them, as if they were unused to being around each other, or under the eye of a camera. It was certainly true on both counts for Penny at least, Ruby reflected. There was a stiffness to her, and her exposed joints were visibly mechanical. A younger Penny than when Ruby had met her, fresh from her father's workshop.

The Huntress looked away, tears in her eyes. That wound was still too raw, even after more than a year had passed.

Her gaze fell then on some sort of display. A cube of glass, encasing a hefty contraption. Ruby got closer, happy for the distraction. The machine's purpose was impossible to discern, but it was clearly out of order. A whole side of it appeared… melted somehow, exposing shattered electronics. Looking more attentively, she thought she could make out a wrecked row of SSDs and the remains of the most complex motherboard she had ever laid eyes on. Was it some sort of computer? But what were…

"Ruby Rose?"

She jumped with a startled squeak. The man on the picture was standing halfway down a row of stairs, having finally made his way to her.

"That is you, is it not? Ruby Rose? I remember, well, seeing your file."

"Oh, yes! That's me, sir! Er… Doctor, sorry. Doctor, yes. I'm Ruby Rose, very nice to meet you!"

Doctor Polendina only chuckled at her flustered response. "I, too, am glad to meet you, Miss Rose." His smile fell. "Penny, ah, spoke very fondly of you. I had hoped that she would eventually introduce us to each other."

"Oh." Ruby looked down. She knew coming here that it would come up in conversation, and had hoped to learn more about her late friend, but that had been more abrupt than she had prepared for.

"My apologies. It was not my intention to upset you, but I saw that you had already seen her… well, her brother."

"What! How?" Ruby looked again at the broken machine beside her. Penny's _brother_? As incredulous as she felt, though, she could not deny the look of deep sadness on Doctor Polendina's face. He had made his way to the display and raised his hand, not quite touching the glass, yet looking for all the world like he wanted to comfortingly pat the device.

"James mentioned you were aware of the focus of my research?"

"Yes! He said you were studying Aura, sir! Er… Doctor?" She did not mention that she was also aware of one way his research had already been applied, that the scientist was and should stay unaware of.

"Please call me whatever you are most comfortable with, Miss Rose. And you are correct. Aura is a very deep subject. I believe I know more about it than any man on Earth even though I have never been very proficient with it, yet every day I am reminded of my ignorance. I owe Aura my moments of deepest grief and greatest triumph. My research has already gone so far above what I thought possible yet I have made little progress in the goals I first set for myself when I first dipped into the field.

"You see, I was given all the funding, resources and manpower I would have liked with one simple directive: find new ways to harness Aura. All went well at first, and we had some promising results. Materials that could conduct Aura farther were first discovered, and we then found means to manipulate it outside of the Hunter's control. This was huge, as in all likelihood we would soon be able to gather and amplify it. Can you even think of the possibilities?"

Polendina had grown agitated and enthusiastic at the end of his speech, and Ruby found her mood buoyed a bit, even though she knew for a fact that story had not ended well. She tried to indulge him and think of some applications. "Well, if you can make our Aura stronger, we could fight longer and train harder, I guess?"

"Yes, very good, but that goes further! The average civilian will never have enough Aura to withstand more than a stiff punch, no matter how long they train. If it could ever be made practical, boosting their Aura would make them safer. If Aura can be manipulated outside of the user's body and what they are in contact with, it would be possible to reinforce bullets until they can punch through even the strongest carapace. If Aura can be sustained and amplified, Aura batteries are a possibility. Each of our drones could become as resilient and deadly as a Hunter, and we could bury Grimm under our steel until we can finally claim areas of Remnant man has never set foot in before!"

"This is great!" Ruby knew it could not be that simple, that Salem would always find ways to hinder any such plan and retaliate, but the man's enthusiasm was undeniable. Ruby was a Huntress, and would always feel happy about protecting people and exterminating Grimm. "How did it go, then? What happened?"

The mood dampened immediately, and a more somber Polendina continued the story.

"Everything went horribly right, is what happened. The next step was to create a feedback loop, that is, continue sustaining the Aura our circuits captured after the Hunter had withdrawn, and if at all possible amplify it further. PAC-0z87 was at the very heart of the experiment."

"Pac… what?"

The scientist had a quick smile. "PAC-0z87. Call him "Paco" if you prefer, that's what my colleagues and assistants have gotten used to. Personally I felt baptizing him after the fact was… somehow, more disrespectful."

"PAC-0z87, I got it Doctor." It was a mouthful, but Ruby was determined to get it right. She felt she owed Penny that much. "So… what happened to him?"

"Oh, until the very end PAC-0z87 was not a "him." _It_ was the computer that we specially built for the experiment, designed to monitor and measure the Aura involved at any point of the process and handle the more tedious operations to control it. It required adjustments to be made quickly and with no room for error, so we could not have handled it without automatizing the operation.

"Everything went as predicted at first: the Hunter put his Aura into the circuit, it conducted easily across it, and PAC-0z87 managed to sustain it when the Hunter left it alone.

"Our first clue something had gone wrong was when the Aura's signature changed. It shifted slowly at first, then suddenly its very nature had become different. No two people have a similar Aura you see. The one running in our circuit had never been recorded before and had nothing to do with the Hunter that had volunteered for the experiment. It also started flowing erratically, ebbing and rising without sense and running along paths that had never been designed to conduct it. PAC-0z87 began to overheat, Aura flooding him and distorting his components, until he was destroyed!"

The last sentence had been rushed through breathlessly, anguish clear on the man's face. He took a moment to regain his composure before continuing.

"This shattered a lot of our assumptions you see. First of all, seeing Aura as a destructive force seemed quite unnatural. It may have been a Semblance, but we think what happened was that some components were reinforced to the point that it put stress on other adjacent ones, or some processes overclocked until self-destruction. We are still unsure, and there is nothing more frustrating when so much depends on the answer. Secondly the Aura in the circuit behaved in a way that was not only unpredictable but also quite impossible for the system we had designed. That was an even greater mystery, and it is at that point that James got involved.

"The project as a whole was under his nominal control to begin with, and he had been enthusiastic about the possibilities. But until then he had not felt the need to intervene past granting us whatever resources we required. He grew concerned about the PAC-0z87 disaster, though, and had a look at our progress. He solved that particular mystery for us, you see. He had a lot of experience with military hospitals and found that this fiasco had similarities to some... cases he had been witness to.

"I do not think he was the one to mention 'suicide' but I know he was the first to suggest 'sensory deprivation.'"

Ruby put her hands to in front of her mouth, eyes widening. Polendina sighed.

"Aura is a characteristic of sentient beings, Miss Rose. As I am not a religious man, I did not entertain the thought that this particular correlation could go both ways. Grimm do not have Aura after all, and they are indubitably sentient. But the evidence was there: I had unknowingly brought life into this world. Not organic life, certainly, but without doubt a sentient being the nature of which still eludes me." His gaze was fixed on the broken computer, grief and longing warring on his face. "PAC-0z87 was certainly unlike any being on Remnant. He had no eyes or ears, only the instruments we had designed to measure Aura. He had not enough processing power to support sapient thought, by a long shot, yet he was self-aware. What happened exactly? Did he destroy himself out of anguish, or in the thrashings of a confused newborn? That mystery is what I now strive to solve above all else. Who and what was my son?"

There was a long silence then, that Ruby dared not to break. Eventually, Polendina's gaze shifted to rest on the picture beside the glass display, of him and Penny. He managed a small, wet smile as he pointed it out for Ruby.

"James was the one who suggested building Penny, you know. I was scared of the implications, and full of guilt about what I had done. But he convinced me. His idea was brilliant! Since we knew that sentience could be granted under particular conditions, we had to replicate these conditions in a way that the being we created could communicate with us, so that he could tell us of his needs and we could best study what was happening to him. And since humans are already capable of all these feats, that was what we should seek to emulate. And that is what we did, with more care and forethought than you could imagine. It was unbearable to think that my first child may have died of loneliness, so we made Penny as close to human as we could manage so that she could best fit in among us.

"It was uphill work, I'll tell you that. James assembled most of her frame himself, he had access to the most advanced prosthetics in Atlas to work from. I was busy creating her brain, the most crushing responsibility I have ever assumed. I had to provide a framework for Aura manipulation that would allow her sentience, but how much of her personality and capabilities was I to program into her, what should she develop on her own? What _could_ she? I am prouder of the adaptive design I came up with than of anything else I have ever done. She would learn and grow naturally as she interacted with her environment, just like organic beings. And I am even prouder that I managed to do so with only hand-picked help. The ethical implications of what we were doing… We built her in as much secrecy as possible, and it took us years. James assured me that it would be best to publish our results as a fait accompli, with Penny having already proven herself and gathered supporters. If we were going to upend religious tenets and cultural values, it would only be done with incontrovertible evidence and glorious prospects. I think that is why he suggested halfway into it that we build her as a young girl instead of the boy I had imagined. To gain more sympathy."

Ruby kept her mouth shut. General Ironwood had had something else in mind entirely than pandering to the media, but that was another secret she was to keep from the old man. Penny would have been a splendid Maiden, she knew.

"Anyway, the big moment came. I had put in some training and managed to muster enough Aura to launch the process myself. I had insisted on it. When Penny opened her eyes… It was terrifying, but it was such a tremendous moment… The culmination of my life, in many ways.

"Raising Penny was hard work, but quite rewarding. Her first step, her first word… Training her Aura and discovering her Semblance… It was everything I had heard being a parent would be like. Quite fast, too. She was eager, curious and smart. In a matter of months she was getting into trouble and yearning for the outside world. Honestly, I wanted to keep coddling her, but James insisted staying confined would be bad for her, so we arranged for her to visit Atlas, Mantle, to meet new people… I was happier than I had ever been, but in the end it could not last.

"I still blame James for pushing her into it but honestly it sometimes feels like everything was conspiring to have Penny see combat. The plan was for her to accomplish great feats so that people would accept her existence, and it must have been self-delusion on my part to believe that, gifted with Aura and military technology as she was, it could have been as anything else than a Huntress. Despite all our best efforts it was still painfully apparent that she was not human and as much as she loved to grow closer to us she had also grown fascinated with our drones and their purpose. And if there is one defining moment when she decided on that course of action, it must have been when we discussed vacation spots of all things. I mentioned that humans also needed to be under guard when going anywhere that wasn't in a Kingdom, because of the creatures of Grimm and the danger they posed. Penny somehow got into her head that she would change all that, and James encouraged her, saying that if she accepted the responsibility he would train her to protect the world… save it, even.

"I caved in, in the end. I could not refuse her, and he was my superior. So we adapted her body for combat purposes, created weapons that would make optimal use of her Semblance.

"My beautiful daughter left for Vale, and I watched her get torn apart on live television."

Ruby was too choked up to find words, so she just put her hand on his shoulder. The man seemed smaller, withdrawn, as he hugged his arms.

"You know, it was only some time after she passed away that… that I realized I had never found the courage to tell her about her brother."

Still, Ruby was silent. She had her own sorrows, but what could she say to that? From her experience, Doctor Polendina did not need her to say anything, just to listen, which she had done.

She also thought he might need a hug, and was going to give him one, when there was knocking at the door.

The scientist straightened and turned towards the entrance, letting Ruby's hand fall from his shoulder. "Please enter!" he said. Ruby's friends quickly filed in, shivering, Yang in front.

"Guys! You made it!" cheered the redhead. She bounced towards them and was intercepted by Yang, who proceeded to smother her in a mighty hug at her own cry of "Ruby!"

Polendina smiled and decided to ignore the flailing Huntress and her babbling sister. He had before him a motley crew; deciding not to comment on the worn state of their equipment or the youth of Oscar, he chose to address Qrow as the only obvious adult.

"Welcome, all of you! Silvestre Polendina, I am very glad you found me without incident. James did mention you would be coming from far away, though he did not tell me there would be so many of you."

"Name's Qrow Branwen, real pleasure. And yeah, sorry for the invasion, Jimmy said Ruby would catch up with us here and noone wanted to stay at the inn." Smiling, he waved at the gaggle of students. Yang had let Ruby go, and the latter was now busy apologizing for going ahead. "Now… sorry if I don't take the time to introduce everyone, but the General said you could help us. Kid, give it to him."

The hushed conversation quieted completely, and faces straightened. Jaune rummaged in his pocket before handing a Scroll over to Polendina. The scientist fiddled with it a bit, trying to access the files, before nodding.

"Yes, that is not a standard encryption. To think that Arthur is still alive… If that Scroll belongs to him and if he was complicit in the Fall of Beacon, then… wait… is that blood on the casing?"

"He was attached to his Scroll," deadpanned Qrow. "I guess he wasn't that attached to his fingers in the end, there."

Jaune had a nasty smirk even as Ruby looked a bit queasy, but Polendina simply nodded and moved on.

"Very well. Let me assure you, I will give you every assistance I can, i will spare no effort to bring those terrorists, those _murderers_ to justice.

"They will not be forgiven…"


End file.
